Big Idea:
Kindergartners love puzzles. In this activity, students cut apart and put together a Thanksgiving puzzle.

To warm up for this lesson, students stand up, sing, and dance along to a song. This song practices Skip Counting by 10's, and can be found on YouTube. This song is a lot of fun, and energizes my students!

The assignment has a Thanksgiving picture that consists of strips labeled from 10 to 100. Students cut apart the picture, and then must put the picture back together again counting by 10's. When students are re-creating the picture, they glue the strips on to a piece of construction paper.

I gather children around the white board and we count by 10's as I point to each numeral on the picture. Next I demonstrate the task by cutting out the 10, and gluing it down. Once I get the 10 glued down, I call students up to glue the the next two numerals down (20,30). We are now looking at a partial picture with 10, 20, 30. At this point, I believe the class is ready to go try independently.

Resources (1)

Resources

Students work at their tables to cut apart, and glue back together the Thanksgiving puzzle. I walk around the room to assist, and spend a large amount of time at each table. I was really surprised at how difficult this task was for many of my Kindergartners. I think a large portion of the problem was not necessarily the counting, but keeping all the strips they had cut organized. In retrospect, this task might have been better used in a smaller station setting. I have included some pictures of the class at work.

Big Idea:
Many kindergarteners come to school with rote counting skills, but they often do not understand that the numbers they can recite actually represent quantities. This lesson helps to make that connection.